The usual deciding factor in whether or not a viewer likes a film or not is the presence of — major revelation! — likable or at least engaging characters. (And I’m saying this knowing, as we all do, that Jack Nicholson is “likable” in The Shining.) The opposite is also true, of course. If a good film has an especially dislikable major character, viewers are usually (or at least often) inclined to dismiss the film as a whole.

Joseph Cotten‘s Holly Martins has always been my main…actually my only Third Man stumbling block. I’ve been watching Carol Reed‘s 1949 classic since I was a teenager (my father turned me on to it), and time and again Martins has kept me from truly enjoying this otherwise brilliant noir.

Orson Welles‘ Harry Lime is the charming, charismatic headliner, Alida Valli is the most mysterious, Trevor Howard is unassumingly droll and matter-of-fact, and Cotten is a pill — a dour, uncomprehending, sour-faced drag.

Today I happened upon a commentary track on Studio Canal’s The Third Man Bluray, and two great directors, Tony Gilroy and Steven Soderbergh, kicking it around:

Gilroy: But Joseph Cotten….he’s empty…
Soderbergh: He’s a really unique presence in this. He came from the Mercury Theatre, and wasn’t really in movies before Welles put him in movies. [And] I always liked him enormously. He was perfect for this…this kind of part. It’s very possible, in a sense, to cast somebody [for this role] with too much personality.
Gilroy: He has to be lost and he’s just…so lost. It’s not [a matter of his] being sympathetic or unsympathetic. He’s just a shabby character all the way around, and his empty…his naivete and emptiness. It would be hard to take an established movie star with a really strong, established personality…
Soderbergh: And have him be that.
Gilroy: Either have him deliver that performance, ask him to do that, or find it along the way and have it work. But [Cotten] is so…he’s such a slug.

Please name some significant characters who are such a drag to hang with that they damn near kill otherwise good films.

Because of my intense dislike for the bombastic Zack Snyder and the generally morose and haunted DC superhero gang and all their bullshit issues that I don’t care about, my only way into Zack Snyder’s Justice League was the 1.37 aspect ratio, which I dearly love. But I was quickly stopped in my tracks enough when I noticed the desaturated color scheme. And I said to myself, “Okay, kind of an arty deal but otherwise why? How does it improve matters exactly?” It struck me as affected, and I began to lose interest. So I quit around the 40-minute mark. Which means I have another 200 minutes to go before I finish the damn thing. God help me.

I’ve been trying to get rid of the HE pestilence known as “George” and previously as “Arpin Lusene” for months now. I’ve used Disqus protocol to ban him (I’ve successfully banned scores of ugly commenters over the years), but somehow he always re-appears. Every day I delete what he posts, and hours later he returns unfazed. Some days I won’t delete his posts but label them as spam, and once again he’s right back in the thread. There’s apparently a way to erase him for good, and that’s to “shadow ban” him. Except to do that I’d have to join Disqus Plus for $11 a month and $132 annually. Just to get rid of one toxic jerk.

Tatiana suggested reporting him to Disqus as a harasser, which I did. Maybe they’ll get back to me about this. It’s very annoying.

If anyone can suggest a remedy, please get in touch. I know this psycho’s email address, and I wrote him the following this morning: “Go away, leave this site and never return. You’re NUTS, man! If you don’t leave I will post your email address. I have already filed a harassment complaint against you with Disqus. Other aggressive measures are an option. Scram!”

Maher again: “72% of GenZ say they’d like to be an online celebrity, and 54% of GenZ and Millennials say they would become an influencer, ‘given the opportunity’. If, you know, it wasn’t too much work, like making a sex tape. Speaking of which…

[Starting at 4:40] “I can’t be in this time when we’re madly on the hunt for anything with the slightest whiff of white privilege, and then feel badly for…Paris Hilton? Quite the reverse — maybe it’s Paris who owes us an apology. For being Patient Zero for today’s vapid, entitled, famous-for-nothing culture. She kind of birthed the world in which every 15 year-old with a phone aspires to be an influencer. She’s the face that launched a thousand little shits.

“Paris led directly to the Kardashians and then to housewives and teen moms and Heidis and Snooki…a generation of young girls who look up to the ‘role models’ who managed to turn an unenthusiastic blowjob into an empire. Young people who think talent…’my talent is being me! And you wanting to live my life.’ Kylie Jenner is a billionaire based on her ability to sit near a pool.”

You can usually spot the likeliest Best Picture contenders from a pretty fair distance. Narrative, brand-name filmmakers, strong performances, woke-friendly theme, middle-class or family values, likely to be strongly promoted. By my count there are roughly 40 2021 films that could conceivably make the grade. But when you boil it all down and eliminate those are seemingly too popcorn, too genre, too weird or too indie-marginal…well, it cuts the list down.

Here’s a wild spitball roster based on intuitions, gut feelings, hairs on the back of the neck and little devils and angels sitting on either shoulder. By my count there are three films of color, and they’re all big musicals — Liesel Tommy‘s Respect, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and John Chu‘s In The Heights and, I suppose, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, which is half Puerto Rican. The latter two could become contenders.

Other potential Best Pic nominees: (1) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (9.10.21); (2)
Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch (Searchlight, fall ’21); (3) Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, fall); (4) Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up (Netflix, late ’21); (5) Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins (Searchlight, fall ’21); (6) Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter.

Plus the two Shakespeares — Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24, presumably late ’24) and Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (more or less based on the Hamlet saga, Focus, late ’21).

That’s a total of 8 plus the two musicals makes ten.

Other possibilities:

Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley, (12.3.21); Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (10.1.21); Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket, Edgar Wright‘s Last Night in Soho; Leos Carax‘s Annette, Apichatpong Weerasethaku‘s Memoria, James Gray‘s Armageddon Time; Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog; Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (10.15.21); Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind, Mission: Impossible 7 (11.19.21), No Time To Die (October 8)

Plus: Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta; Mike Mills‘ C’mon C’mon; strong>Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman; Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island; Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater; Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water (8.13.21); Jeremy Saulnier‘s Rebel Ridge; Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness; Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden; Doug Liman‘s Lockdown; Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho; Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (11.14.21).

Plus Top Gun: Maverick (July 2); The Beatles: Get Back (8.27); A Quiet Place Part II (5.28.21); Black Widow (5.7.21); The Many Saints of Newark (9.24.21); Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (9.24.21).

What am I missing? Which of the top ten picks seems questionable?

Plot-wise, there isn’t a Bluray on my living room bookshelf that couldn’t be complained about by the 2021 woke mob. Bill Maher is correct — they’re almost all offensive by today’s standards. I’ll just put on a blindfold and pick at random…

Here’s one…Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48)…a racist cattle baron from Texas (John Wayne, who vented his racist views in a 1960s Playboy interview) assembles a team of white cowboys to drive his cattle herd to Missouri, where the cattle will fetch a decent price. White guys and steers, white guys guys and steers…start to finish, no let-up. (And there were definitely Black cowboys in the Old West.) Despite the appalling history of what western white settlers did to Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the natives are depicted as whooping savages looking to kill innocent whites. The one Native American character with dialogue, Chief Yowlachie‘s “Two Jaw Quo”, is described in denigrating terms to Walter Brennan‘s “Groot” character.

Here’s another…Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton (’07) — a seemingly racist New York law firm (not a single prominent POC attorney in sight) is defending a chemical manufacturer called U-North in a multibillion-dollar, six-year-long class action lawsuit, the company having been accused of killing numerous users of a weed killer. George Clooney‘s titular character, an Irish “fixer” with a Black secretary but without Black friends or colleagues (and who regularly plays in a downtown, mostly all-white-guy card game), is told to handle an embarassing episode involving a white colleague, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson)…enough.

One more…Michael Mann‘s Collateral (’04) — In a story that works as an across-the-board metaphor for white exploitation of Black victims, a Los Angeles cab driver of color is more or less forced by a sociopathic (and possibly racist?) white male assassin to passively participate in a series of murders. Worse, the white sociopath shoots an older man of color in a jazz club and thereby traumatizes the cabbie. Still worse, the sociopath charms the cab driver’s mother in a hospital room and thereby creates feelings of rage and resentment in the cabbie. Finally the white sociopath forces the lethargic cab driver to wake up, man up, save the life of a beautiful but vulnerable U.S. attorney who’s taken a shine to the cabbie, and to basically take charge of his life. Basically a film about trauma, terrorism and heartlessness, totally unmitigated by the climactic killing of the white sociopath by the cabbie, and the body of the dead assassin left sitting on a metro car and just making laps around the city, nobody noticing or caring. None of this matters — what matters is that a black cabbie is totally pushed around by a white killer.

Critics and audiences live on separate planets. And critics live within and certainly write for their own cloistered community. Joe and Jane Popcorn know this and regard their opinions accordingly. There are several independent, X-factor, emotionally attuned, basic instinct critics and columnists (like myself), but most critics wear the same monk robes and the same open-toed sandals and drink the same goat’s milk.

Plus critics tend to herd together for safety’s sake. Right now that means most of them are bending over backwards to praise films of a woke caste. Everyone knows or at least believes this. Nothing new here.

I’ve just read through a 3.15 report by statistician Stephen Fellows, titled “Are Film Critics Losing Sync With Audiences?” The answer, boiled down, is “yeah, but not actually or not altogether, or at least not so you’d notice.”

A 3.19 Daily Mail summary of Fellows’ report, written by Adam Schrader, concludes the following: (a) Fans are more likely to agree with films rated highly by critics than those rated poorly by critics; and (b) Fellows’ study concludes that a “de-synchronization” between how fans and critics review movies has taken place consistently over the past 20 year..

Fellows also notes that “factors that influence the discrepancies are a film’s budget and genre.” This seems to indicate what most of us have known for decades — audiences are more generally more supportive of tried-and-true familiarity — and therefore more willing to trust and submit to large-budget genre films than critics. Likewise critics tend to be more accepting or supportive of small-budget indie and non-genre films. Is anyone shocked?

Near the end of Fellows’ report, he states the following three conclusions:

“(1) There is a strong correlation between the average scores of critics and film audiences; (2) However there was never been complete synchronization; and (3) there has been a de-synchronisation taking place fairly consistently over the past two decades.”

So critics and audiences tend to agree about the good and the bad, but they’ve nonetheless been drifting apart for the last 20 years? What does that even mean? Fellows report is tell us nothing we don’t know, except he’s injected a tone of fuzzy vagueness.

HE default #1: “Most critics tend to be dweeby, cerebral, analytical-to-a-fault types. You can tell that by just looking at some of them. Guys who never got the girl in high school — portraits worth a thousand words. And for the most part they process films in cerebral, academic terms — as objects of study rather than journeys.

“Hollywood Elsewhere has always gotten the feeling thang, of course, along with a relative handful of top-dog critics — Ann Hornaday, Owen Gleiberman and Todd McCarthy, not to mention the late Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. An old truism still holds. If you suppress or sidestep the emotional current, you’re missing the essence of a film or certainly a good portion of it.” — “What 90% of Critics Don’t Understand,” posted on 4.26.20.

HE default #2: “[There’s long been] an elite cadre of ivory-tower snobs who have done and are continuing to do their level best to convince Average Joe ticket-buyers to be highly suspicious of critical opinion, if not utterly dismissive of it.

“RT & Metacritic ratings can certainly nudge them or intensify already established feelings or suspicions, but it’s rare when a tide is totally turned. Silver Linings Playbook was a rare example of a movie that really turned and gathered a following after an initial ‘naaah, don’t think so’ attitude on the part of younger women. There are exceptions, thank God, but mostly audiences can ‘smell’ something they want to see or vice versa.” — posted on 8.3.17.

Good Samaritan Tatiana wanted to cheer me up, and so she insisted on treating me to a dinner at Spago on Canon. “It’s so loving and good-hearted of you, but I don’t want to go to a place that attracts tourists,” I said. We went anyway.

We sat in the indoor, open-air patio section with a nice view of one of the fires. We shared three dishes — risotto something-or-other, Black Sea Bass and pizza with Scottish salmon and sprinkled with red caviar.

Me to Tatiana: “Oh my God!…this is the most delicious pizza I’ve had in years, perhaps decades…it’s wonderful!…thank you so much, mon cheri, for insisting on doing this!”

20 or 25 minutes later the actual, real-deal Wolfang Puck, smiling and gentle-mannered and wearing a white chef’s jacket, came over to to wish us well. “How are you guys?” he said. I repeated my wild salmon pizza enthusiasm and Tatiana said everything was great. She didn’t know our visitor but that was okay. The mood was cool and easy.

Tatiana: “Hello, I’m Tatiana, I’m from Russia.” Wolfgang: “I’m from Austria.” Tatiana: “Are you chef?” Wolfgang: “Well, yes…I’m the owner actually.” Tatiana: “What is your name?” And he told her, of course.

I have nothing novel or interesting to say about the original Romanoff’s…nothing at all. It was a famed Beverly Hills in-crowd restaurant that peaked in the ’40s and ’50s, and was frequented almost daily during this hallowed era by Humphrey Bogart, according to biographer Ezra Goodman. The owner, Michael Romanoff (1890 – 1971) was a character with a bit of a shady past. Some used the admiring, affectionate term of “con man”. He claimed to be descended from Russian royalty, but was actually born as Hershel Geguzin in Lithuania, worked as a Brooklyn pants presser, was deported to France in May of ’32 to serve time for fraud, etc. The movie crowd loved him. The first version of Romanoff’s, located at 326 No. Rodeo Drive (north of Wilshire), ran between ’41 and ’51; the second version (240 So. Rodeo Drive) ran from ’51 to ’62. Romanoff played a maitre’d in a studio simulation of Romanoff’s in A Guide for the Married Man (’67).

Reminder: The 4K Psycho Bluray that was part of a 2020 Hitchcock 4K box set (9.8.20) will be purchasable as a stand-alone disc on 5.25.21. Don’t buy it!

Posted on 9.11.20: Last night I watched the new 4K UHD Psycho Bluray disc, and I’m very sorry to report that portions of it are grainstormed all to hell, and I mean totally smothered in swarms of digital micro-mosquitoes.

There were complaints here and there about the previous Psycho Bluray (the 2010 50th anniversary edition) being overly DNR’ed (digital noise reduction), and so the Universal Home Video grain monks (i.e., “the grainmakers”) went into the control room and took their revenge.

The new Psycho reminds me of that 70th anniversary grainstorm Casablanca Bluray that Robert Harris and Glenn Kenny were so stuck on, and which I hated.

The older DNR’d Psycho Bluray (which I can no longer find on Amazon) is much more pleasing to the eye. Yes, I know that the DNR’ed look isn’t what the film really looked like when it came out of the lab in ’60, and I couldn’t care less. All the surfaces and textures look clean and smooth and ultra-detailed, but now the Universal gremlins have injected hundreds of billions of throbbing mosquitoes into this classic Hitchcock film.

Plus there are some scenes in the newbie that appear way too contrasty. Steer clear of the 4K version and stick with the 2010 Bluray. If you don’t own a copy, buy one now.

By the way: As noted earlier, the 4K Psycho includes some excised material that had never been available before, including a brief glimpse of Janet Leigh side-boob as Anthony Perkins watches her undress through a peephole.

Also: The knifing of Arbogast (Martin Balsam) at the bottom of the stairs now includes two or three extra stabbing strokes. Except the sound of Arbogast’s “arrhhwwghhhh!” is oddly delayed. The knife plunges in a couple of times, but he doesn’t go “arrhhwwghhhh!” until the third stab. Brilliant.

Note: The top video clip is an ECU of the Bates Motel parlor scene from the new 4K disc. The Egyptian mosquito grainstorm effect is obvious to the naked eye. The below video clip is an ECU of a scene from the 2010 Psycho Bluray — very little grain to speak of.

All I can tell you is that Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin‘s Tina (HBO Max, 3.27) instantly bored me. I could just feel an intention…actually a determination to be as kind and worshipful as possible…to go easy and paint an adoring portrait of a great pop superstar blah blah. So after watching for 15 or 20 I turned it off. So I don’t know anything except what I could feel coming around the corner.

Here’s a 5.16.21 review from someone who actually sat through it — i.e., The Spool‘s B.L. Panther:

“Just like the Whitney (’18) documentary before it, Tina begins with the intention of teaching us how to better appreciate its subject only to get caught up in the same drama it set out to avoid. As a result, we learn little else.

“There’s no real delving into her musicianship and development of sound/style during her solo years. The years in between Ike [Turner] and the Private Dancer album seem rife with explorations of LA cabaret scenes, how TV became instrumental in crafting celebrity stories/careers, and how Tina was discovering what it meant to be herself at that time.

“Indeed the discussions of Tina’s music largely take a backseat. Her later albums are unremarked upon. I want to know how and why Wildest Dreams sounds like it does. Does she have nothing to say about recording an iconic Bond theme? We learn nothing about how to better listen to Tina. No musical collaborators appear to talk about being with Tina in the studio/on set.

“This is a woman who toured and performed with the greats yet we hear nothing about how Tina fits within mutual exchanges of inspiration happening across the pond in the 70s and 80s. She’s ‘the woman who taught Mick Jagger how to dance’ yet we never hear that story or what it means for us. How does Tommy fit into the story of freedom in Europe she talks about in the documentary? We never learn why she settled in Europe and relinquished her American citizenship.

“Most of all I wish we could have understood more of how love has changed Tina’s life. There’s zero mention of how it saved her life. There was such a persistent void of love in her early life that an exploration of how Erwin Bach changed her and how love affected what she sang about or how she sang it. How did her Buddhist faith practice evolve once she found the love she’d been searching for? That questions like these still linger shows that there’s not enough follow-through with some of the other big motifs Lindsay and Martin set out at the beginning.

As part of its recent review of The Carole Lombard Collection 2 in 1080p, DVD Beaver has compared screen shots of an old Lombard collection on DVD vs. the new Bluray masters. Here, for example, are comparisons of a shot from Mitchell Leisen‘s Hands Across The Table (’35), which costarred Lombard and Fred MacMurray.

The brighter, sharper, more glistening image is from the 2006 DVD and the grayer, darker, murkier image is from the 4.6.21 Bluray.

Who in their right mind would even toy with the idea of buying the Lombard Bluray set? What Bluray technician in his or her right mind would say, “Okay, let’s see…we want the Bluray to deliver a ‘bump’ over the DVD — something that looks sharper, richer, more gleaming — so let’s make the film look grayer, duller and less contrasty…like it’s covered in light fog and muck sauce.”

Gary W. Tooze‘s DVD Beaver review excerpt: “The three films in this set were offered on DVD in 2006 as part of Universal’s ‘Carole Lombard — The Glamour Collection.’ The new 1080p image quality advances the presentation with more layered contrast, although the first two films can appear ‘lighter’ by comparison..”

More honest Tooze: “The Bluray has more information, of course, but it looks kinda shitty.”